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Seen all these fancy multimedia programs and fancy having a go yourself? Well, er, probably not!
Most people have much better things to do with their time than to sit in mortal combat with their electronic foe.
However, if you have the patience, and want to write clever, sophisticated and very colourful multimedia programs of your own, you could do a lot worse than loading up Software giant Asymetix's latest offering, Multimedia ToolBook for Windows, version 4.
It was over a year ago that we put its predecessor, version 3 through its paces. Impressed as we were with this very powerful, yet easy-to-use multimedia authoring system, long term use of version 3 revealed a few annoying shortcomings.
The worst problem was that its early release shipped with a bug, which caused programs written with it to crash intermittently, if they used your computer's built-in clock.
Multimedia ToolBook version 4 boasts this, and almost all of the other bugs and annoyances are now fixed. It also runs programs much more quickly than its predecessor.
Bundled on both CD ROM and floppy disk, Multimedia ToolBook is a very large application with loads of extra goodies, including a brilliant computer graphics conversion program - which allows you to convert from any format to another - almost!
You also have doodads to tweak sound samples, and a gismo to draw your own icons. There are also a number of sample applications bundled with ToolBook... You may plunder these at will, and use their various programming jewels to adorn your own multimedia programs.
This is one of the first development applications whose programming language actually resembles plain English. Called OpenScript, its structure resembles Microsoft's VisualBasic, although many of the key words are different.
The on-screen help system includes a key word conversion page so that VisualBasic veterans can get into OpenScript. Even so, if you are a seasoned VB user, writing in ToolBook drive you potty until you realise that is often simpler than you think.
Making stunning sound and visual effects, fade-ins and fade-outs and page turns usually only needs one or two lines of simple programming code. The programming language is probably one of the simplest in the world.
Once you have figured out how to achieve the effect you desire, you can copy to the Windows Clipboard and paste great chunks of code and use them over and over again.
Retailing at about £600 in the UK, Multimedia ToolBook relatively expensive. However it is a tool for business and design professionals, which doesn't require users to have a degree in computer science in order to drive it.
You need a multimedia computer to run Multimedia ToolBook, with Windows version 3.1 or better. This latest version of ToolBook is optimised for both Windows 3.1 and Windows 95, and you can tweak your applications for either platform.
You can just get away with a 486 PC with 8MB RAM, although developing multimedia applications really demands a Pentium, packed with at least 16MB RAM.
If you intend to include video clips, large colour photographs or sound samples in your programs you should also be prepared to snaffle up loads of hard disk space. Fortunately, hard disks are currently very cheap, with 1 GigaByte (1,000 megabyte) drives costing under £200.
A multimedia PC worth its office space must also have a CD ROM drive capable of running at double speed or faster. You should have a SoundBlaster compatible sound card as well. Most cards ship with a disk or two, packed full of useful software - and some splendid toys as well!
You also need a decent monitor. Obviously larger screens are much easier to use than small ones. - FST (flatter squarer tube) monitors have dropped in price considerably in recent years - so go for at least 43 cm or preferably 48 cm (17 or 19 inch).
If you have a powerful enough PC, but one that's not up to MPC (Multimedia Personal Computer) standard, many quality suppliers will provide the necessary CD ROM drive and sound card for as little as £120.
